Tag Archives: Falmouth

On Monday I attended the Jump Start AgriTech event hosted by the South West Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications at the Tremough Innovation Centre on the University of Exeterâ€™s Penryn campus near Falmouth in Cornwall. As the name suggests the one day event covered innovations in AgriTech with a particular focus on what is, or could be, happening in the South West.

The day began with a series of short presentations and Paul Harris, Rothamsted Research, was up first on their Open Access Farm Platform. North Wyke Farm in Devon has been equipped with a variety of sensors and instruments to understand the effects of different farming practices. Of particular interest to me was their analysis of run-off, weather monitoring and soil moisture every 15 minutes; this is a great resource for satellite product validation.

I was up next talking about Earth Observation (EO) Satellite Data for AgriTech. Having seen people overpromise and oversell EO data too many times, I began with getting people to think about what they were trying to achieve, before looking at the technology. The circle of starting questions, on the right, is how I begin with potential clients. If satellite EO is the right technology from these answers, then you can start considering the combinations of both optical/microwave data and free-to-access and commercial data. I went on to show the different types of satellite imagery and whatÂ the difference in spatial resolution looks like within an agriculture setting.

I was followed by Vladimir Stolikovic, Satellite Applications Catapult, who focused on the Internet of Things and how itâ€™s important to have sensor network data collected and communicated, with satellite broadband being used in conjunction with mobile phones and WiFi coverage.

Our last talk was by Dr Karen Anderson, University of Exeter, whoÂ looked at how drones can capture more than imagery. I was particularly intrigued by the â€˜structure from motion photogrammetryâ€™ technique which allows heights to be determined from multiple images; such that for a much lower cost, you can create something similar to what is acquired from a Lidar or laser scanning instrument. Also, by focusing on extracting height, data can be collected in conditions where thereâ€™s variable amounts of light, such as under clouds, and it doesnâ€™t requirement high accuracy radiometric calibration.

After coffee, case studies were presented on farming applications:

VirtualVet – Collecting data on animal health and drug use digitally, via mobile apps, so paper records donâ€™t become out of data and data can be collated to gain greater insights.

Steve Chapman, SC Nutrition Ltd, talked about improving milk production by making sure dried food is optimally prepared â€“ large pieces of dried sweetcorn are digested less well, and a lower nutritional value is extracted from them.

The delightfully named, Farm Crap App from FoAM Kernow, aims to encourage farmers to spread manure rather than use artificial fertilizer. Farmers tended to go for the latter as it is easier to calculate the effects, and so having advice, regulations and the important calculations in a phone app, rather than in paper tables, should help them use manure.

Caterina Santachiara, ABACO, describing their siti4FARMER solution which is a cloud-computing based platform that includes data which scales from the field to farm and large land areas, with individual customisation so that users can easily see what they need to know.

Finally, Glyn Jones from AVANTI, talked about how farmers can stay connected to the internet, and tech support, while out in their fields. This sounds straightforward, but none of the current technologies work well enough â€“ mainly due to the fact that fields arenâ€™t flat! So a new technological area of investigation is â€˜white spaceâ€™ â€“ these are frequencies allocated to broadcasting services, but left unused in particular geographical locations as buffers. The availability varies from location to location, but it is available to lower-powered devices.

After lunch, there were some presentations on Agritech funding opportunities from Innovate UK, AgriTech Cornwall and the South West Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications. The day concluded with a facilitated session where small groups explored a variety of different ideas in more detail.

It was a really good day, and shows that there is real potential for AgriTech to grow in the South West.